A Review of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora, edited by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Janine Joseph, and Esther Lin — January 25, 2025
As Donald Trump’s second term as President begins, and the political atmosphere for millions of people is one of foreboding, I’ve been rereading Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora, edited by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Janine Joseph, and Esther Lin (Harper Perennial, 2024). The anthology features fifty-two poets who are, or once were, undocumented; that is, they have “settled in the United States without explicit sanction from the government.” Readers are invited into over 200 pages of the dreams, fears, perspectives, and experiences unique to those who have, sometimes for decades, lived in a precarious legal and social limbo. In a Trumpian zeitgeist, these poets are viewed by some as criminal or, at least, with disdain.
In a timely rebuttal, Here to Stay presents the undocumented experience with compassion, civility, and nuance. In fallacious oversimplification, news media often refer to migrants as a homogenous group. One of the aims of the anthology is to demonstrate the heterogeneity of the migrant experience: “Among us,” the editors explain, “there are various statuses, including recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), holders of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), international students whose visas have expired, those who have crossed the Sonoran Desert, formerly undocumented who have become newly naturalized citizens—to name a few.” The poets in the anthology are from all over the globe: the Philippines, Taiwan, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, Cameroon, Nigeria, Peru, Brazil, El Salvador, South Korea, Nicaragua, Kenya, etc.
Lauren Camp, whose family came to the U.S. from Iraq nearly half a century ago, writes, “My father hears nothing and nothing becomes the gate / he walks through. There is nothing / but what has been erased.” Her poems are an exploration for what has largely vanished to time and distance. A motif of ghost places and rootlessness haunts the book. Locality, the certainty of place, the taken-for-granted sense of belonging the documented millions feel—it isn’t shared by most in these pages. danilo machado writes in “mapping/s”:
locating landmarks, neighborhoods
—those conjured cardinals of medellín i can’t follow become lost reminders
of what i don’t know of the roads that wouldn’t recognize me upon return
Yet despite the stresses and precarity of being undocumented—or perhaps because of those—many of these poets display a strong commitment to community and a thankfulness for the quotidian. Claudia D. Hernández, for example, writes, “I remain in LA, dedicated to teaching in Southeast LA, working with immigrant children like myself. This community is where I belong, where I find purpose, and where I want to be.” The anthology itself is an act of community and connection, and reading it, one feels included in a strong comradery and compassion. In the introduction the editors write, “By its nature, poetry lends itself well to the art of the underground. To whisper, to express oneself via a disguise—artists in oppressive states rely on such tools. All this is achieved with tools available to almost everyone: pen, paper, and the mind.” There’s an electricity to these poems, an urgent now, now, now that we are invited to be part of, to open the book and hear, as if in secrecy or confidence, the poets whisper and speak.
Human history is a history of migration. The book is dedicated to “all of us—before, now, and to come.” Each poet prefaces their work with a paragraph or two—an introduction or short essay—which are as rich as the poems that follow. Jan-Henry Gray writes about the relationship between poetry and migration:
“I understand the broken line. Being undocumented trained me to see, accept, and eventually celebrate all kinds of discontinuity and disjunction. For those of us whose lives are marked by breaks in lineage—childless queers, migrants in diaspora, refugees, exiles—artmaking can help mend the ‘unhealable rift’ of being from but not of a place. To make material of one’s life into art is an attempt toward cohesion.”
And what coheres in these pages—despite stylistic and formal variety—is the power of art to make the poet and the reader more whole, and to intend a more whole future and a more complete sense of history. As Ayling Zulema Dominguez describes, “In the American education system, we are taught to perceive colonialism as a thing of the past, when every day I would go home to a family presently deeply affected by the U.S.-Mexico border: hard proof of ongoing colonial occupation and segregation.”
In so many of the cities and tribal lands that the border crossed—habitations often much older than that invisible geopolitical line—families live on both sides of the border, a preposterous arrangement, uncivilly and unintelligently imposed. With regionally acute climate change, political instabilities, heightened criminality, diminished opportunities, etc., one imagines a future not with less but with more migration—and, perhaps, migrations made out of even greater necessity. These poems are a window into the various realities that result from such journeys.
Janel Pineda is the U.S.-born daughter of parents who came undocumented to Los Angeles in 1980, fleeing the U.S.-funded Salvadoran civil war. I’ll close with a short poem of hers that beautifully and metaphorically addresses a crux of the migration crisis: Where can one belong, and what does belonging look like? What does the dream of family look like in a context of limbo, and how does one find peace?
“Feeding Finches”
Ever since the foreclosure notice was posted on our front door, my father has been feeding finches. Palming safflower seeds and shelled corn and white proso millet into a makeshift feeder by my sister’s plants. The finches come in flocks, bowing before food. My father watches them take turns wing-bathing in the dog bowl before flying off. He lets them go, knowing they’ll return, knowing he’ll feed them again. What else is a man’s worth, but the promise of seeds he offers his children? What else but the halo of a roof he secures atop their heads?
